All right, buffs, let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1961 the great director Akira Kurosawa made a lightly veiled homage to American Westerns called Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cold-eyed samurai-for-hire who teaches an overdue lesson to both warring factions in a lawless town–now located in…
In the final scene of The First Wives Club, a comic fantasy in which three middle-aged women take revenge on the husbands who have traded them in for newer models, the triumphant heroines, all dressed in stylish, sinless white, link arms in the glistening dawn streets of lower Manhattan and…
If Cameron Diaz knows what’s good for her, she’ll settle down with a nice, stable insurance salesman in rural South Dakota, have five kids and vote Republican forevermore. Hey, it could happen. For now, though, the spectacular blonde who helped transform Jim Carrey from geeky bank clerk to strutting superstud…
Look out below. Here’s another movie about a child’s grief, a hard-shelled grownup’s loneliness, and the healing power of imagination. It unfolds in Las Vegas (the city of illusions) and Newark, New Jersey (Harsh Reality, U.S.A.), and features Gerard Depardieu in, roughly speaking, the role of Harvey the invisible rabbit…
When movie actors talk in reverent tones about David Mamet, Team Hollywood’s designated thinker, it’s probably not because they regard him as the nation’s leading playwright. Or because of his famous insights into the emptiness of the American Dream and the casual cruelties of the business world. Or even because…
While Republicans and Democrats spend the summer wrangling over custody of the American family, our most thoughtful filmmakers continue to address the burning issue with less bombast, but in far greater depth. Case in point: Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo. In a swift hour and a half, this promising new…
If you’re going to spoof a movie genre, it’s probably best to reproduce the old plots and characters and cliches to near-perfection, then give the mannerisms a hard, deviant twist. The keenest humor, after all, always lies close to the truth. In The Big Squeeze–a mutant take on Forties film…
At the midpoint of Escape From L.A., a futuristic action yarn from director John Carpenter, protagonist Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) walks along a crumbling street with Taslima (Valerie Golina), a shell-shocked but spunky resident whose shag haircut seems to have been created by DuPont Stainmaster. It’s a nothing bit, really–a…
Is it a trend or just an accident? In any event, the old Andy Warhol crowd has inspired two films this year, and you can envision a time when they’ll wind up on a double bill in what’s left of the revival houses. For now, the more interesting of the…
If you’re wondering what Travis Bickle has been up to for the last twenty years, here’s the answer. He’s changed his name to Gil Renard, taken a job selling big hunting knives out in San Francisco and become the baseball fan to end all killer baseball fans. Or so it…
In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner swaps his swim fins for a three-wood and hits one down the middle of the fairway. Costner has, I think, always come off better playing ordinary guys–the aging bush-leaguer of Bull Durham, the farmer who reconciles with his father’s ghost in Field of Dreams–than stainless-steel…
Kansas City, Robert Altman’s moody valentine to his hometown, unfolds on the eve of an election in 1934, when Boss Tom Pendergast was setting new standards for public corruption in the Midwest, the fleshpots were thriving, and the wide-open city’s famous jazz life was in full swing in the smoky…
By all accounts, Francis Ford Coppola is putting some pretty good wine into the bottle at his vineyard in Napa. Let’s hope so. Because the filmmaking career of one of America’s great directors has now hit the bottom of the barrel, and his future may lie entirely in viniculture. In…
The genteel pleasures of Jane Austen have recently become a familiar commodity to American moviegoers–even if quite a few of them are, like, unaware of it. To wit: The sublime English novelist’s comedy of manners Emma, published in 1816, was the inspiration for last year’s teen smash Clueless, in which…
The exhilarating paradoxes in the new Scottish drugs-and-destruction movie Trainspotting–fast becoming a hip hit on this side of the Atlantic, too–are that it takes as much pleasure in the depth of its nightmares as it does in the sting of its satire, and that its self-wasting junkies manage somehow to…
John Grisham’s legal thrillers are the Big Macs of American publishing–more filler than meat and devoured in alarming numbers by consumers who are not interested in real nourishment. Then the books are dutifully recycled as Hollywood movies–because waste never really goes to waste in pop culture’s digestive tract. The former…
The good news about James Mangold’s Heavy, a gritty, small-budget first feature centering on a shy, fat mama’s boy whose life is wasting away in the kitchen of a dingy bar and grill in upstate New York, is that the place is completely free of space aliens, and Demi Moore…
In Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, the age-old drama of soldiers doing battle gets a treatment-in-depth that is both overdue and welcome. Between the outright flag-wavers of the 1940s in which John Wayne single-handedly defeated the treacherous Japanese and the heart-of-darkness job Hollywood eventually did on the divisive Vietnam War,…
Between comeback kid Eddie Murphy’s lively new take on The Nutty Professor and the unintentional nonsensicality of the sci-fi megahit Independence Day, this has turned into a pretty good summer for movie yuks. For my money, though, the sharpest and funniest comedy of the silly season is Multiplicity, a breakneck…
The lean, windburned sheriff at the heart of John Sayles’s Lone Star descends directly from the classic lawmen of Hollywood’s Old West–quiet loners obsessed with raw justice and denied the comforts of home. But Sayles’s present-day creation, Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), has a slightly different bale of hay to burn…
In the realm of movies aimed at preteens, there is probably very little this discerning group won’t find dorky. An exception, I say with some trepidation, might be the long-overdue movie version of Harriet the Spy, which is a joint venture of Nickelodeon TV and Paramount Pictures. The late Louise…
The so-called phenomenon in Phenomenon first shows itself when a likable but dim-witted auto mechanic played by John Travolta suddenly starts beating brainy Robert Duvall at chess. A little while later, the ex-dumbbell learns Portuguese in twenty minutes, just in time to save a lost boy’s life. He cleverly engineers…
